Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir (2008), has been almost universally hailed as a brilliant and visionary anti-war film. Winning scores of international prizes, this "haunted autobiography" is largely understood as a harrowing exhumation of repressed traumatic memory. In my close, contextual analysis, I demonstrate that Folman's "tormented psychoanalytic journey" of remembering the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacre--offers a skillful simulacrum of penitence. Instead of foregrounding a condemnation of aggression, the film systematically denies Palestinian subjectivity and contributes to their erasure. Rather than rejecting Israeli discursive patterns, the film reproduces hegemonic discourse, humanizing youthful Israeli soldiers, while paradoxically legitimizing violence against the Other. Rather than daring and revelatory, the experimental use of CGI and Flash animation in Waltz with Bashir can be seen as contributing to a further veiling of Israeli complicity. In these ways, I read the systematic avoidance in the film as eerily analogous to the "indirect responsibility' of the Israelis in the massacre itself, as cited in the Kahane Report. In their essay "Old Wars, New Wars," members of the Pil and Galia Kollectiv argue that in films like Waltz with Bashir, "the experience of war is presented as an amnesia... framed as completely external to culture and representation...in war, one is literally alien to oneself." They further argue that "the horrific condition of warfare in the postmodern age does not derive from the irresolvable friction between the supposed normality of everyday life and the real rawness of fighting, but, on the contrary, from the smooth blurring of the two." Hence the perceived dichotomy between states of war and states of peace is a fantasy in post-industrial states where militarism is an everyday part of life. My critique further highlights that Folman's intention to create an anti-war film positing the innocence of the common soldier is not a convincing project when most Israeli citizens are conscripted participants in militarism. The final thrust of my paper is a discussion of the film's critical reception, which has generally lacked nuance. I argue that such apolitical reception is only possible in a world in which the erasure of the Palestinian is well underway. In a successful closed circuit, the film helps to produce a passive viewer who will see the Sabra and Shatila massacre as an isolated past event, rather than a deranged process that continues to this day.